BYRON YORK: Biden’s reckless threat.

Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer “literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. As for the president, McConnell said, “It was a tale of two press conferences — endorse the agreement in one breath and threaten to veto it in the next.”

GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, who was one of the bipartisan group of 21 negotiators, was much more blunt. If Biden is going to tie the two bills together, Graham told Politico Playbook, “He can forget it! I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”

Graham said most GOP senators, and even some inside the bipartisan group, did not know the Biden-Pelosi-Schumer plan. “Most Republicans could not have known that,” he told Politico. “There’s no way. You look like a f—ing idiot now. I don’t mind bipartisanship, but I’m not going to do a suicide mission.” And that was that. The bright, shining bipartisan deal instantly became much less than it seemed.

“On the infrastructure deal, Biden’s word lasted about two hours,” York concludes. Was this and Biden’s F-15s and nukes ad-lib a bit of what was called in the Obama era “stray voltage?” As Allahpundit noted his post on the latter Biden debacle, he noted that Bombs-Away Biden may have wanted take the spotlight off of a report that he was planning to the worst thing of all in the far left’s eyes: refund the police. Acting like a hardliner on guns helps to take the spotlight off that. As he added, “Dems are almost certainly going to lose the midterms regardless but if Biden can convince swing voters that he’s at least trying to address their biggest policy anxieties he might be able to hold down the losses.”